Facebook Locations: How to add multiple stores to a Facebook Page

I love Facebook Locations. If you run a local or international business with more than one physical shop, you should love it as well and consider to implement it. Locations, previously available to large brands only under the name of Parent-Child Framework, is now available to anyone.

Facebook Locations helps potential clients to locate your shops, plus it does many other useful things! Locations adds 2 elements to your Facebook Page, a “Locations” tab and a “Nearby Locations” section, which provide addresses, opening times, phone numbers, directions and traffic, and virtually any other kind of information that a potential client may need to pass by and make a fat purchase. Isn’t that your ultimate goal? The best yet to come: It works on mobile.

Lots of businesses still do not pay enough attention to adding actionable contact information to their Facebook Pages. Multi-location brands that do pay attention, still find barriers when several addresses need to be added to their brand Page: That’s because a Facebook Page can list one address only at the time. Companies used to solve for it by adding a custom location tab, which did not make the job at all: Tabs created with third-party apps are not displayed on Facebook mobile. Other companies used to create an individual Page for each store location, which in most cases is inconvenient and becomes time consuming as shops grow in number.

Helping people to discover where your shops are located is just fantastic, but Facebook Locations can do much more: It can help you to create a solid, well localized social presence and a responsive customer support. But that’s another story, let’s keep it for another episode.

How to activate Facebook Locations

Facebook Locations is now available to all common humans, but it needs to be activated first: Activate Locations

Ten minutes is how long I had to wait to get my application accepted. Whether yours is accepted or not, you should receive an email from Facebook. In case your application is successful, Locations will be available under Settings.

Add multiple locations to your Facebook Page

Before to start adding store locations to your Facebook Page, make sure to have all the information needed at hand, such as addresses, phone numbers, emails and opening hours. Done? Let’s start.

From a desktop computer, go to “Settings, Locations”. Click “Add a Location”: Facebook asks you whether you prefer to “Choose an existing Page”, meaning a Page that you already manage as Admin, or “Create a new Page”. In this example I will go for “Create a new Page”. Type in the information about your first store and press “Save”. Repeat the process to add more stores. At this point the “Locations” tab should be available on your Facebook Page, both on desktop and mobile: Visitors can use it to visualize your stores in a map, on desktop, or listed by proximity, on mobile.

Each store location is now associated to a new page, named Store Page, which uses the same name of its Main Page, plus a unique Local Descriptor as differentiator. Example, if McDonald’s Facebook Page is named McDonald’s Burgers, its Store Pages would be named something like McDonald’s Burgers (Piccadilly), McDonald’s Burgers (Covent Garden), and so on. Clients can decide to Like McDonald’s brand Page and/or any of its local Store Pages. By default, Store Pages also mirror the Main Page’s profile picture, cover photo and newsfeed content, which can also be customized on a Page by Page basis. You clearly understand where Facebook is trying to go: Locations seems to be designed to provide useful and actionable contact information about your stores, but also to help each of those stores to connect deeply with consumers, independently posting local content and building local customer support, both pre and post sale.

Marketers willing to go simple can opt to either show no content on their Store Pages, or to mirror the Main Page’s posts, which is kind of convenient. I’d suggest to go for the latter. No matter where people interact with a post of yours, engagement results will be summed up and shown on both your Main and Store Pages (Likes, Reactions, Comments, Shares). Consider that some people might not be fan of your brand Page, but still Like your local Store Page, eventually because one of your stores is located in their neighborhood. So why not taking advantage and showing them your brand’s stories even on local Pages.

It is an approach that simplifies and may help, especially considering that not all small & mid businesses are ready to manage multiple Store Pages as independent communication channels, creating stories capable to engage deeply with local consumers. Going so local requires time, human and financial resources, and not all companies are willing to fund these kind of projects. The cultural barrier clearly plays a huge role as well: Too many entrepreneurs and managers do not understand the power of digital marketing yet. Many of them simply do not have a real understanding of what Facebook marketing is all about and what it can offer, so they ignore the opportunity. On the other side, it is also true that in certain places, like Mauritius, where I do live, companies open to digital marketing do struggle recruiting skilled and experienced digital marketers.

Optimize Facebook Locations

Strange enough, but if you go back to “Settings, Locations” and click on the pencil icon next to each store entry, you will notice that the Edit Location’s pop up includes 2 new fields:

Local Descriptor. Customize the descriptor that appears, in brackets, next to each Store Page’s name. Simpler option is to use the name of the neighbourhood – or city – that houses your local shop.

Facebook Web Address. Be fast. Choose a unique web address for each of your stores. A Web Address can be used to direct people to a specific store’s Page, and can be added to your offline communication, eventually in combination with a Facebook Messenger Code. Point is, even if you do not plan to use Web Addresses anytime soon, claim yours asap because they are unique.

The Edit Location’s pop up also lets you decide whether a Store Page should display the “Nearby Locations” section. I like to display “Nearby Locations” on each Page, to help people understand that they are visiting a specific Store Page actually, and that more locations are available to shop.

Know you know that Facebook Locations provides the tools to help you connecting people to local stores. It is now up to you to understand how to implement it, depending on your specific objectives and resources.

Local Corner. LUX Café Mauritius

I do live in Mauritius island, so I tend to be more exposed to what local brands do, or don’t do. For some, examples are clearer than tons of words, so I made an effort to identify at least one local brand that may benefit from Facebook Locations. At first I thought at KFC Mauritius and McDonalds Mauritius: Both owns lots of shops, but none is implementing Locations. Finally, I landed on a more local brand, which is usually not bad at all in digital marketing. My intention is not to criticize, instead I’d like to highlight opportunities for improvement.

Those who travelled to Mauritius may have heard of a beautiful group of resorts named LUX Resorts & Hotels. What I do love about LUX is their attention to food. Eating is at the core of each decent vacation actually, isn’t it? Couple of months ago I visited a friend of mine at LUX Belle Mare Resort: By the pool I noticed a beautiful stand alone ice-cream shop named ICI, which gelato is just superb! LUX does not sell ice-cream like most hotels do. The group actually designed a stand alone brand, like if it was an independent store inside each of their resorts. Similarly, they designed a LUX Café, a stand alone concept for a high-end café and fine patisserie shop.

What’s smart about the move, is the ability to leverage their brand equity to expand beyond resorts and diversify the business. That’s actually what happened in 2015, with LUX opening 2 LUX Cafés outside their resorts’ boundaries. Sounds great to me! But let’s give a look at how Facebook was used in a such an important moment.

LUX Café currently owns one Facebook Page, which lists the address of their first store, located in Trianon. Lately, a second shop was opened at Bagatelle Mall. No page was created for this location, so as people started to check-in, Facebook automatically created an Unofficial Page, which is actually going wild, collecting tons of terrible client’s reviews, missing contact information and suggesting lots of competitor’s shops to visitors. But most importantly, it represents a communication channel open to the public, and to those who may desire to discredit the brand. Anyway can post on an Unofficial Page, and the brand has no ability to moderate what people post. Best you can do, is repost. Good luck! Build brand reputation may take tens of years. It is not the case to put your brand in any small or big danger situation like this.

SUGGESTIONS: Consider claiming Facebook Locations on LUX Café official Facebook Page. LUX Café will become a Main Page, and its local address (Trianon) will automatically be removed. At this point it is sufficient to add 2 locations, LUX Café (Trianon) and LUX Café (Bagatelle). 2 new Store Pages will be created, their picture, cover photo and content will mirror the brand page, on which you will focus at first. Each Store Page will allow local reviews and provide specific contact info and opening times, plus they will be accessible from mobile, allowing people to discover your closest shop and get directions! Direct communication chat for each shop can also be activated: Think about a client willing to ask to a specific shop how much it would cost to organize a birthday event there, or another willing to make a take-away order on its way back from work. Opportunities are clearly there, and they cost no money.

THE DAMAGE IS DONE: When people started to check-in at Bagatelle, no LUX Café was probably available as location. In these cases, Facebook creates an Unofficial Page so that it can keep tracking people’s locations. Unfortunately, when those pages represent a geographic location, it is not possible to delete them nor claim them. Lots of businesses are complaining, but Facebook did not listen so far. Result is that the Unofficial Page, and all its negatives, will remain visible to the public. In such cases, as long as a brand reacts quickly and drive people’s check-ins and Likes to the proper Store Page, the Unofficial one may loose visibility over time. Hopefully, Facebook will fix this soon.

Share your thoughts

Do you already use Facebook Locations? Yes? Post a comment, I would love to hear about any interesting story or insight you may have gathered along the way. No yet? If you need help setting things up, feel free to message me.

For instance I have a small family business with two stores. The first store was both our store and our main ‘brand’ page. Then we created another one for our expansion. Now I have 2 locations without a main page. If I try and make a location page off the first page, it will wipe all reviews and location data and make that our main page. Well that’s no good. We want to keep the energy and love that was put there. But what’s the best practice for existing businesses who are trying to back-track into a new feature? If I make a new ‘brand’ page and then attach the others, does any of that like-love trickle up?

As is the case with some many things on facebook, facebook itself is the worst resource. For 2 days I’ve been researching locations for 2 clients in particular. Both have existing pages. One has 1 page and looking to use Locations. One has 3 pages, a 4th coming and no main page.

Marco, you are either number 1 or number 2 in GLOBALLY in explaining how the Locations ACTUALLY work. I want to include some things from the other post that I found very helpful. For the most part you two are on the “same page”. One thing that stood out as different was your suggestion to create a new “brand” page that any existing pages would be absorbed into once the brand page was made “the parent” (Main Page) in facebook Locations. You mentioned don’t worry about a lack of likes….obviously you’ll will build the likes. But in this other article that author mentions that any page that he has requested Locations on that had less than 300 likes was immediately denied (a 3rd article quoted it @ 200 likes). So I was curious to know if you had seen that also?

Frank Downey

Sorry to keep pestering….

If we were to “absorb” existing Pages into a Location framework. I see that they will not have the inheritance of the cover photo blah blah. I also saw where you can choose whether or not to have Location pages get all posts from the Main (brand) Page.

Would the pre-existing Pages get the NEW posts from the Main Page if that is enabled (or just newly created location pages)?

The lack of iinheriting the photos is not a big deal. But the future posts would be.

Frank Downey

And another quick question. It seems that to get facebook support there should be a fb Advertising account to get any real help.

Some of our clients just don’t pay for ads. Some pay and run them on their own fb Account. Some pay us and we run them under our Agency fb Account.

How will this relate to requesting the Location access? Should we request the access as the fb Page Owner, or will it matter if we just use our Agency (of course a Page Admin) account to request access? If we use one to request Locations access…can we use the other down the road to get support?

Thanks

Marco Bigatton

Hello @ciordia9:disqus

Here is what I would do:

1.Change the username of your current pages https://www.facebook.com/username
Idea is too free the main brand username @TheSecretChocolatier and assign a localised one to each of the current stores, for example using this structure @TheSecretChocolatierStreetName.

2.Create a new brand page (assign @TheSecretChocolatier as username and call the page The Secret Chocolatier if that’s your brand), claim locations on it, add your previous pages as Store Pages. Reviews should not be lost.

3.I would decide to mirror your brand page content to your Store Pages. You post on main page and content is posted on the other 2 pages automatically. Engagement is summed up and shown on each page where the post appears. This way you still leverage the organic traffic of your biggest page. Differentiate well the cover of each page to help people understand what is store and what is brand.

4.You can decide to manage messages at global level if there is one person doing that job (you?) or let each shop have a direct chat with clients. That’s good if your shop team is active on social media and stay close to the clients. In store, in packaging etc you could include the Page Messenger Code to convey people questions or orders to facebook messenger. It depends if you like to handle communication with clients thru facebook or not.

I would not be scarred by the fact that your brand page starts at 0 like. Forget the likes, focus on the business, especially if facebook is your only or main marketing channel. Facebook marketing is quite powerful and not expensive if you know how to handle it 🙂 My most precious advise is this: Post few things, but well crafted. Post a quality photo, or a slideshow, that show what you do, or storytell about brand or people at your store … then focus on make that content get visible. I personally like to pay for facebook, because it speed up the process and it give you back tons of insights and results (real business). Some people post tons of content, good or bad, but they forget that nobody is seeing it, nobody is engaging with it and so no business is generated 🙂

Hope this helps! Let me know how it goes 🙂

Marco Bigatton

Hello @ciordia9:disqus

Happy to let you know that today a client of mine was in the same scenario as described by you below. What I made was simply to claim Locations on the main page. As that page was created years ago, there were lots of reviews and checkins associated to it. Claiming locations did not delete any of them: What I got was a Main (brand) Page, which does not allow for address, new checkins and new reviews, but included all the old checkins.

Once Locations was created I went to the panel and found an “alert” by facebook (see attachment) telling me “The main page is a place. You can migrate its place information to a new Location Page” … if clicked and I created a new location, with address set as the address of the initial page (now Main Page, without address anymore). New Store Page included all the old reviews and checkins, which were removed from the Main Page. At that point I create new locations (Store Pages) for other shops the client had.

All worked great and it was a page from a well know international brand with around 8 million fans! So I recommend you to try 🙂 Hope this helps!

Ciao
Marco

Chris Smith

Hi Marco – thanks for this article, it has been very helpful.

I think I’m trying to do the same thing Andy is trying to achieve, but just want to clarify if you don’t mind?

I have one Facebook Business Page that has been around for about 5 years.

I now want to create 3 other locations on Facebook for my business and then have them all appear on my original page.

The Starbucks Australia page above is the head office, with an address included on it. It then links out to all the other Starbucks locations under the “nearby locations” tab.

Is that setup achievable for me – and if so, is there a process I can follow to set it up?

Thanks again.

Chris

Marco Bigatton

Hello @disqus_dspLEhn2aZ:disqus

thanks for your comment. Setting up a page such as Starbucks Australia is kinda easy … the only thing that is not standard is the fact that Starbucks’ Main page also feature the headquarter’s address. Main Pages (what you want to achieve) and Global Page do not allow you to list an address (see attachment), which has to be managed as a separate Store Location / Place Page. Here is what I would try to do (PS I am assuming that your current page has no reviews or checkins):

1.Setup your current page as if it was already your brand page: list the address of your headquarter, phone, map location, change the username is necessary to make it look like a global one.

2.Only now claim Locations on your current page, and add all the locations you need to. This will add the tab that lists all the addresses of local stores.

3.Despite the initial page will become the Main Page, it is possible that the address you previously filled in stay visible. But pay attention, I am not sure whether you can change it later on.

All is quite simple. The only challenge is to add the address on the Main Page. I will do some testing to check whether the category you chose for your Main Page influences or not the fact that you can list the address. I guess that it should not change a lot. Let me check and I will follow up. Good luck

hey Marco,
Question I am trying to create locations for my page and when I request for location access it says error problem with request… How can i get it fixed my page is facebook.com/furnish123chicago/

Marco Bigatton

Hello @willsaid:disqus

when I try to visit your page I get an error. Have you checked whether your page is actually published. To claim locations, page must be published first. Once location is active, you can un-publish at any time and setup locations properly prior to re-publish.

Ciao
Marco

Marco Bigatton

Hello @willsaid:disqus

when I try to visit your page I get an error. Have you checked whether your page is actually published. To claim locations, page must be published first. Once location is active, you can un-publish at any time and setup locations properly prior to re-publish.

Sorry for late reply @disqus_OPMzDpCiXE:disqus. Just visited your Page and noticed that Locations is finally active. Good luck

Jeroen van Rootselaar

Hi there, thanks for this awesome article! I was searching for this for a long time. I only got one last thing to sort out but can’t get it working. How can I mirror the news feed of my main page on my location pages? Is this a setting and where can I find it if it is? https://web.facebook.com/africamps/?_rdr

Marco Bigatton

Hello @jeroenvanrootselaar:disqus , you can access Locations, and set mirroring, by going to your Page’s Setting and then selecting Locations from the side menu. If you use Business Manager, in its menu, under Assets, you will find Business Locations. Have fun

Jeroen van Rootselaar

Hi @Marco Bighton, thank you so much! Yes mirroring was just a simple setting in the locations set up menu. I missed that one first.

Jeroen van Rootselaar

Hi Marco, thanks again, all my locations are approved and the post on my main page (https://www.facebook.com/africamps/) are showed on my location pages. The only confusing thing is that I can see these posts on my location pages on my computer but not on mobile. I’m also wondering if the posts, that are forwarded from my main page, are also pushed on the news feed of clients who only like one of my location pages? Do you maybe know the answer to this?

Marco Bigatton

Give me your email pls. I will explain 🙂

Get Outlook for iOS

Jeroen van Rootselaar

Hi Marco, it’s Jeroen(@)africamps.com. I just found out that I can see the posts on mobile, but not from my page manager..

deppenmagnet

Hey, thanks for the great article! i just recently started working as a social media manager for a small restaurant brand and I’m hoping you could give me some quick advice. We’re talking about 5 restaurants – 3 of them running under the same name. All 3 of them also have their own Facebook page, each with about 150-500 followers and all 3 of them are about 30km distance to each other. Does it make sense to keep the multiple pages (mainly for of the individual reviews and adresses) or would it make more sense to fuse them together? My thought behind fusing them, is that with the combinded 1000 followers, the interactions will go up and thus the videos and special offers will reach more attention. And since the restaurants are just an half an hour drive apart, customers might be more likely to check out the other locations as well. I get that it makes sense for bigger brands to have multiple pages for each location, but I really feel that this would be the best solution for our case. Am Iwrong? The other idea would be to use the parent/child structure, by either building up a main brand page from scratch or fusing them together for the combined likes and starting new child pages (downside here would again be the loss of existing reviews and maybe too much scattering, regarding the fact, that we only have about 1000 combined page likes). Or are there other options I’m not aware of? Sorry for my crappy english, I’m from germany and in a hurry typing this 😀